Don Peebles

For Don Peebles, the variegated industry veteran who’s just as comfortable leasing office buildings in Washington, D.C., as he is building condos in Miami Beach, the key to 2022 was adapting. 

On a variety of projects across multiple cities, Peebles adapted to higher interest rates, the decreased utilization of traditional office space, and the whims of city and state legislatures, whose vote counts held the future of his ambitious real estate visions. 

“If we’re going to classify it, it was a transition to the normal, but a transition back to the future,” he said. “We’re all doing business differently now in terms of how we once were and in how we look at real estate deals.” 

Through adaptation, Peebles found opportunity. His firm leaned into life sciences construction — highlighted by Parcel 25, a $500 million development in Boston’s Chinatown, which will include lab office and affordable housing upon completion, and also entered  a new market in Atlanta, where The Peebles Corporation was selected to build a mass transit development at Bankhead Station that includes affordable housing. 

“We have been focused on what the next opportunities are, where they are, and what we see as opportunities for this next market cycle,” he said. 

Peebles’ flexibility and patience has also paid dividends on a pair of complex, big-city projects. 

His massive Angels Landing mixed-use development in Downtown Los Angeles — a $1.6 billion retail, hotel and luxury apartment complex — secured the necessary entitlements last year to proceed to construction. And his ambitious Affirmation Tower on Manhattan’s West Side — a proposed 2 million-square-foot mixed-use development that would be the world’s tallest building constructed by a Black-owned firm — is gradually rising from the dead, after being momentarily scuttled by the state. 

The $3.4 billion project’s RFP is expected to be reissued by the state, according to Peebles, and his proposal would include two hotels, a number of office spaces, an observation deck, a civil rights museum and “probably a residential component.”

“There’s a groundswell of support for Affirmation Tower and what it stands for,” he said. “I travel a lot for business and meet with mayors in other cities. They say if we won’t build Affirmation Tower in New York, then come to our city and do it.”